Cheyenne Alexis McKeehan, a Tennessee girl, aged 3, accidentally killed herself on Sunday night, according to local police in Wilson County. The incident allegedly occurred after she mistook a gun for a Wii controller.

Investigators claim that the girl's stepfather, Douglas Cronberger, had left a semi-automatic weapon on the living room table, and that the child had mistaken it for a Nintendo Wii controller. The child is then said to have fatally shot herself in the abdomen. She was rushed to hospital, but pronounced dead the same night.

The stepfather claims he was asleep at the time of the incident, according to authorities. The stepfather also claims the child's mother, Tina Ann Cronberger, was in the room with the child at the time of the incident. The mother was supposedly sitting at the computer, just a few feet away.

The mother has told authorities the girl might have thought she was playing with a Nintendo Wii controller that resembled a gun. According to the stepfather, the gun was out because he had heard a prowler and gotten the gun out earlier that evening. He then left the gun on the table in the living room. The gun is apparently a .380 caliber semi automatic handgun. The gun was usually kept unloaded and in a cabinet.

The child had been playing a Wii game. The game’s controller, according to authorities, was shaped like a gun that looked very similar to the real handgun. Cheyenne had learned how to use a gun from playing the Wii game for days. The authorities claim the girl "pulled the gun off the table and it went off."

There are no criminal charges pending, but the sheriff's office will turn information culled in its investigation over to prosecutors.

parent leaves loaded gun within reach of child and then tries to blame the child's subsequent and unsuprising death on the fact that a wii controller (in plastic gun thingy I assume) looks quite similar to the gun.

UNBELIEVABLE.

No doubt he will now be looking for a lawyer and suing nintendo for their callous indifference to child safety.

My dad and uncle both keep guns for recreational shooting. In this country, the stringent security checks and the sheer amount of extra work you have to do to your house in order to store the guns means that you need a secure lockable weapons store for them.

Course, if you're the sort of person that leaves a loaded (and cocked) gun around the house where there's a toddler, it's not really going to make much difference how stringent those laws and checks are.

It's an incredibly sad story. What's even sadder is that this, like a lot of other game-related tragedies, probably has more to do with the person's own circumstances than anything to do with gaming.

Updated the article with new details from a third source. This answers a few questions:

- She was playing a Wii game at or around the time
- The Wii controller did resemble the handgun
- Apparently she "pulled the gun off the table and it went off"

So we probably are looking at a girl mistaking a gun for a Wii controller, but it appears the firing may have also been an accident, which is to say the gun went off simply due to her pulling it off the table.

It's ridiculous that anyone can blame anyone the parents for this. It isn't their fault that a real gun looks so similar to the Wii remote that a child gets confused between the two.

I'm just surprised and relieved that this hasn't happened earlier but it's only going to get worse when the playstation wand (or whatever it's called) is released. That will look so much like a gun that even American teenagers will get confused.

I believe 2011 may go down as the year when game related deaths reached an all time high.